Greg Ewing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I don't know PRECISELY what you mean by "universal newlines mode" > > I mean precisely what Python means by the term: any of > "\r", "\n" or "\r\n" represent a newline, and no distinction > is made between them.
Excellent. While this over-simplifies the issue, let's stick to the over-simplified form, as we may be able to get somewhere. The question is independent of what the outside system believes a text file should look like, and is solely what Python believes a sequence of characters should mean. For example, does 'A\r\nB' mean that B is separated from A by one newline or two? The point is that, once we know that, we can design a translator to and from Python's conventions to any reasonable system (and, as I say, I have done it many times). But, if Python's own interpretation is ambiguous, it is a sure recipe for different translators being incompatible, even on the same system. Which is what has happened here. So, damn the outside system, EXACTLY what does Python mean by such characters, and EXACTLY what uses of them are discouraged as having unspecified meanings? If we could get an answer to that precisely enough to write a parse tree with all terminals explicit, this problem would go away. And that is all that I say can or should be done. The details of how to write the translators to other file systems are then a separate matter. Regards, Nick Maclaren, University of Cambridge Computing Service, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
